


I Pray it Sleeps

by Magichorse



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Ending, F/F, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Not Canon Compliant, one-sided Ianthe Tridentarius/Harrowhark Nonagesimus, post-GtN
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:20:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26111767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magichorse/pseuds/Magichorse
Summary: "I pray it lives, I pray it sleeps ..."After becoming a Lyctor, Harrow refuses to accept God's assurance that Gideon is lost to her. Over the years after the events of Canaan House, she searches tirelessly for Gideon's body and a way to bring her back.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 5
Kudos: 33





	1. At the Edge of the Empire

**Author's Note:**

> _"I pray the tomb is shut forever. I pray the rock is never rolled away. I pray that which was buried remains buried, insensate, in perpetual rest, with closed eye and stilled brain. I pray it lives, I pray it sleeps ..."_

Camilla Hect stood on a small concrete balcony, back turned to the sprawling metropolis below. Around her, the commercial neon lights of Iseyar City flashed in their rhythmic, staccato patterns, occasionally throwing her austere features into relief. A red glow lined her sharp jaw one instant; the next, a green strobe made pointed shadows of her jaw-length hair. A single white flash briefly lit her deep brown eyes, and then all went briefly dark before the cycle began again. 

Up here above the smoggy evening traffic, she was a single figure among many. Thousands of identical balconies stretched up and up on Tonmen Tower, showing glimpses of the lives inside; a pair of ragged teenagers passing a rolled cigarette back and forth, someone beating a threadbare rug, small children sticking skinny arms daringly through the rusty bars. The straight-walled, brutalist structure had been built to house as many of the city’s poor as possible and was ever abuzz, a small city unto itself. Dense and sprawling, containing miles of stairways and corridors, it was almost entirely impossible to police. That’s why she favored it for business.

From the outside she might have appeared to be at ease, elbows propped back on the iron railing, one foot kicked flat against the bars. Yet, the fingertips of both hands brushed the pommels of the two curved swords at her hips and her attention was trained fixedly into the darkened and empty flat, at the shabby wooden door.

As the city’s central communications tower swathed the city in seven white flashes to mark the turning of the hour, two light knocks echoed into the empty room. Her client had arrived on schedule. Her heartbeat increased just the slightest.

“It’s open,” she called sharply, and slipped her palms fully to the hilts of the blades. Not that it would help her if this was who she had reason to believe it was, a small part of her mind offered unhelpfully. She shoved the warning away. She would believe it when she saw it.

The door swung creakily open and a single figure entered, clad all in black beneath a grey _taieke_ , a local kind of cold weather garment which draped the wearer like a heavy shawl. Even with this nod to blending in, Camilla could tell immediately that this was not a city native. The garment was clearly brand new, for one thing, and it was wrapped in the wrong manner. Camilla’s lips pursed tighter, though when she looked to the figure’s face, she almost breathed a sigh of relief when a painted death’s head did not stare back at her, until she realized her mistake.

Stepping toward the center of the room, head bared, was a female who appeared barely twenty years of age. Her dark hair was feathered loosely around her face and her eyes, which appeared wholly black in the unlit apartment, were deeply ringed with shadows in the gloom. Small, pretty lips frowned over a pointed chin. Almost unrecognizable—almost—without the ritual paint of her unholy order, against every conceivable reason, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, now Harrow the First, ninth Lyctor to serve the King Undying and venerated necrosaint, was standing before her on this far-flung, filthy rock of a planet.

Camilla removed her hands from her swords. Taking a necromancer in a one on one fight was poor odds at best; a Lyctor was impossible. She wasn’t sure she wanted to fight anyway. She wasn’t sure, now that all of her suspicions had been confirmed, how she felt at all.

“You go by Hex now, is it?” asked Harrowhark, breaking the silence. 

“In the trade, yes, and I’ll ask you not to use my name and I won’t use yours. Not that anyone would believe me.”

“No, they wouldn’t, would they?” said Harrowhark lightly, and Camilla wasn’t sure if it was meant to be a veiled sort of threat or not. No one here to hear you scream. “Not a lot of Lyctors here. Not a lot of necromancers in the backwater.”

“They kill them as infants here, when they can,” said Camilla flatly. Necromancy was unilaterally hated and feared for its connection with the endless conquest of the Empire. It was just a fact of life in the outer reaches, and something she had developed a heart-deep numbness to. And yet, perhaps she said it just to see the pain of it hurt someone it still had a hope of touching.

“I know,” said Harrowhark quietly, “I can hear them in the atmosphere. Generations of souls who cannot rest.”

Camilla shifted a little against the railing, uncomfortably. She had always figured the day would come when the Emperor’s adepts cornered her. She had been at Canaan House; she had seen too much. It was inevitable, just…she hadn’t expected it to be Harrowhark. She swallowed dryly, aware that she felt like she would rather have had anyone else do the job than one of the only two people in that whole doomed trial who she might have considered a friend outside of the Warden. She schooled her face into an emotionless mask and took a deep, brave breath.

“Well,” she said at last, as cold as she could make it, which she knew to be ‘very,’ “You found me.”

“Yes, and it wasn’t easy. You’ve clearly tried to get as far away as you could from what we went through ten years ago.”

“Not far enough, it seems.”

“No,” said the saint, “And I can see you are not happy to have been found, but,” and here she tipped her head up a little so that the patterns of light filtering in from the street caught her expression, and Camilla was taken aback to see that a deep worry creased her delicate face, “We need your help.”

There was a pause, and the silence was filled only by the rush of vehicles far away on the street below. 

“You and…Gideon?”

“Who else?”

“If you’d said the Necrolord Prime I might have decided to die swinging my swords at you.”

Harrowhark’s expression was grave. “I can understand your feelings. I am still in His service-”

“Still His instrument.”

“Still His instrument,” agreed Harrhowhark.

Camilla frowned in thought, weighing her options carefully, weighing the past against the present.

“I won’t help you,” she said at last, and with conviction, “In ten years you’ve wrought half a myriad’s worth of destruction across the galaxy, snowballing this war into a conflagration. I’ve heard about the horrors you raise on the battlefield.” She pushed herself off the thin railing and advanced slowly toward the necromancer. Harrhowhark, for her part, did not twitch a muscle. Maybe she didn’t need to move to cast anymore, thought Camilla. What monstrosities these Lyctors were. “But,” she said, looking Harrhowhark square in the eyes, “I will help Gideon.”

The Lyctor looked profoundly relieved. Almost human.

“Camilla, I can’t begin to thank you--”

“What does she need?” Camilla cut her off.

“I need a corpse first.”

What a necromancer thing to say. She missed Palamedes sharply, suddenly.

“Alright.”

“A fresh one.”

“Alright.”

“I tracked your next bounty for you. Savoy the Black Jewel will be meeting his mistress for dinner at The Palm. I’ve paid her off, she’ll leave him alone on the terrace at 8:30.”

“Alright,” said Camilla, somewhat amused in spite of herself at the thought of the former Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House and current Fist and Gesture of the King Undying playing the part of bounty hunter accomplice. “I’ll see you in two hours,” she said, shrugging some tension out of her shoulders and moving to walk past Harrowhark.

“I’m coming with,” said the necromancer.

Camilla gave her a sharp side-eye. “The second you so much as toss a bone chip in front of these people, let alone spring up a skeleton army, this city will go into a full red alert.”

Wordlessly, Harrowhark reached back over her shoulder, grasped something firmly, and the familiar blade of Gideon’s longsword came into view for just a moment before the necromancer let it slide heavily back into its scabbard on her back with a small _wsskt._

Camilla gave her another look, cautious but re-appraising. “Fine,” she said, “If you can actually wield that thing.”

“I’m past the need for bluffing nowadays,” replied the Lyctor.

Camilla nodded in concession and walked out the door, leaving it open for Harrowhark to follow after her.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

They moved swiftly together through the crowded streets, Camilla in the lead and Harrowhark a silent wraith at her heels. The evening scene was as crowded as the day, with night markets springing to life when the sun went down. It was easy to avoid attention amidst the general din.

A block from their high end destination, Camilla ducked neatly down a side street and up a winding fire escape. All buildings in Iseyar City were tall, and this was no exception. It was no fewer than twenty-two flights of stairs before they emerged at the top. Even though she hadn’t kept an eye on her, when Camilla glanced back she saw Harrowhark had kept pace, with only the slightest hint of labor to her breathing.

Camilla crouched, checked to see that the Lyctor had done the same, and nodded to her right where the building stretched the length of a city-block, mostly flat but broken up by steaming exhaust pipes. She moved low and silent in that direction, staying away from most of the more obvious cover and instead moving cat-like along the edge of the building and the two-hundred-foot drop.

As they neared the final third of the roof, Camilla stopped and pointed at two figures that were, when one focused, clearly recognizable as crouching humans themselves. With the lights of the city coming up from below, it was impossible to make out their finer features.

The central tower had flashed eight times in the recent past, and Camilla had been counting in her head ever since. She settled in for a few more minutes, and then said to Harrowhark, jerking her head at the hunched figures, “Take care of them,” before launching herself straight at the space between the two people and leaping clean over the side of the building and out of sight.

The two guards who had taken the high ground overlooking their boss’s dining location gave little grunts of surprise as she sailed past, pulling guns from concealment, but the shots never rang. Camilla spared a glance in midair to see Harrowhark slice the head of the first one clean from his shoulders before she had to focus on hitting the regal terrace jutting over the cityscape below. She glimpsed the retreating figure of a woman at the far end of the platform, a man in a black suit watching her leave the lavishly set table for two. He looked up as Camilla landed, but he was only halfway out of his chair when Camilla punched a blade straight through his heart.

Harrowhark joined her a few seconds later, looking dispassionately at the drug lord. Camilla removed the blade smoothly, slipped off a few of his black jeweled rings for proof of the bounty, and waited.

Harrowhark pulled the remaining empty chair over and said, “Why don’t you have a seat?”

“We shouldn’t linger too long.”

“This won’t take long.”

She placed the fingertips of one hand to the man’s forehead, and the other hand she rested over his. She made a few practiced necromantic symbols against his brow and, with the same dispassionate violence as a hunter skinning a rabbit, flayed the lingering soul clean out of the body.

The motion was so gruesome and unexpected, Camilla gagged. What the fuck. What the actual fuck.

“Now,” said Harrow, removing her fingertips from the corpse’s forehead but leaving the one over the hand, and looking at Camilla, “This is what I need to know. You may have been the last person to see Gideon’s body at Canaan House, and I need to know exactly, and I do mean _exactly_ , what you saw.”

It made sense that Harrowhark would ask her the most impossible question that there was. She opened her mouth to tell her so, and also to tell her that performing depraved acts of necromancy openly in front of her did not endear her to her cause, when the corpse’s eye’s shuddered open, a golden color they had never been in life, focused on her and said:

“Yeah, bitch, where’s my body?” in what was unmistakably Gideon Nav’s voice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading chapter 1! Any multi-chapter undertaking is a marathon, and not a sprint, so I hope that many of you will stick along for the ride : )
> 
> This fic was conceived in the aftermath of my finishing Gideon the Ninth, and is therefore centrally based on the information that was available at that time, and now wholly contradicted by the events of Harrow the Ninth. Like, it is just fantastically wrong, but you can see why I would have made some of the guesses I do about Gideon's identity. This is hopefully just enjoyable for its own sake now and satisfying to those who want their Griddlehark fix, with a bit of Ianthe lusting after Harrow for fun.


	2. On the Mithraeum - Part 1

_One Month Ago_

Ianthe enjoyed looking at Harrowhark. During the Lyctor trials she had been too distracted by the proceedings to properly observe the Ninth House necromancer, even though the former Reverend Daughter’s unexpected show of power and intellect had begged her attention. Now the events of Canaan House were long distant, and Ianthe had the promise of myriads to devote to contemplating the manifold mysteries of the universe, and she intended to start with Harrowhark the First.

It wasn't just the genius or raw talent, she thought, which made Harrowhark so alluring. It was the suffering. An unfathomable grief transformed the sharp angles of the young woman's face into an artist’s rendition of lovelorn tragedy, caused her eyes to sparkle with a consumptive pain, smoldered in her chest like the apocalyptic wreckage of a dying sun. Baleful, beautiful. Some days, she wanted to sink her teeth straight into her for a taste of it. Other days she wanted to slap her to her senses and scream that their cavaliers were never coming back. It really depended on the day.

While she cultivated her own interest in Harrowhark, she wasn’t the only one to develop a fascination with the former Reverend Daughter. Harrowhark the First had become an overnight sensation upon her ascension to Lyctorhood. The Ninth House had so long been shrouded in myth and secrecy, the sudden public appearance of a black vestal was almost like the production of something equally fantastical from the far corners of space, like a live dragon. Drearburh had since teemed with new penitents eager to gaze upon its mysterious depths of sacred bones, swelling the House ranks to levels it had not seen in a myriad. Harrow's austere, skull-painted face could be found on iconography across the galaxy from the Nine Houses themselves to the distant shrines of shepherded territories. Who could have guessed it would be a shadow cultist to reignite the nationalism of the Empire?

Harrowhark’s popularity extended beyond the civilian population, as well. Her skills as a Lyctoral bone magician made her a legend on the front lines. Ianthe had once found herself at a Cohort officer’s function in the wake of a conquest, and watched those military men and women forget themselves entirely in their eagerness to impress her, and to no avail. No matter where she was, Harrow had a way of staring straight through people as if they were not real to her. This seemed to drive most, including seasoned officers, either to frantic obeisance or mad with desire. It was an absolute riot to watch. Ianthe was real to Harrow, though. When she swept down to the dance floor that evening in a champagne gown, graceful as a golden swan, Harrow’s absent gaze focused and narrowed on her as if the moment she looked away she’d find a blade in her back. It was flattering. And true. And it meant that Ianthe was not refused when she approached, gave the slightest bow to the black vestal, and requested a dance. It was glorious, spinning slowly among the jealous stares of the merely mortal who couldn’t dream of touching her. At the night’s end Harrow declined the invitation to bed Ianthe breathed in her ear as always, but she never minded. As the centuries wound their lives together, she was sure, the day would inevitably come when the answer became yes.

In the present, Ianthe was staring in at Harrow through the doorway of one of the archival rooms which stretched along one spiral arm of the Mithraeum. When Harrowhark did not show any signs of noticing her before she got bored, Ianthe cleared her throat and got the satisfaction of startling her sister Lyctor badly instead. Harrow’s head snapped up from the ancient book in her lap and she fixed Ianthe with a glare, made more ominous by the ever-present death’s head paint.

“Oh, _Harry,_ fancy seeing _you_ down here,” said Ianthe with a casual slouch against the doorframe.

“What do you want, Tridentarius?” asked Harrowhark.

Ianthe lazily examined the shimmering bones of her skeletal right arm, as if she were here on a minor errand and not, in fact, about to ruin Harrow's day. “I just came to tell you that the Emperor is on to your sneaky little _game,_ so you’d better hurry up and do whatever it is you think you’re going to do.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” said Harrowhark coldly, making a show of returning her gaze back to the book, which appeared to be a very ancient collection of Cohort transmissions. How dry.

“Don’t play stupid, Harry, your face isn’t made for it. You’re planning a trip to Canaan House. Oh—that _is_ it, I see.”

That had gotten her attention. Harrow’s eyes flicked up and locked on hers, and Ianthe could read the startled tension plainly in the clench of her delicate jaw and the minute catch of her breath.

“You’re good, Harrow, but you’re not better than God. He is, well…God. Don’t take it personally, you’re still a devilishly brilliant little witch of a person. If it helps, not even I figured it out.”

That expression was simply to die for right now. Ianthe loved getting one over on Harrowhark. It was rare and therefore vastly rewarding.

“He’s been watching you,” said Ianthe, “Had you tailed by the Saint of Duty, I suppose." She stopped the examination of her gilded fingers and looked Harrow in the eyes. "I’m sorry to rain on your parade, truly, but it does bring me to why I’m here—”

“What did you say to him?” asked Harrowhark suddenly, and too softly. Ianthe could sense her momentary surprise curdling rapidly to anger. 

“Me? Waste my time with God talking about you? You narcissist. No, I’m here to _help_ you, Harry,” said Ianthe smoothly, and just a little bit quickly. She did not want an explosion of bone spears ripping her flesh apart today. This was one of her favorite dresses and the blood would never wash out. “I came to offer you the use of _The Charybdis_ , my personal shuttle, for your dark and secretive purposes. You can pilot, can’t you? Use it to get him off your trail for a moment. Just don’t, I don't know, crash it into anything and you won't even owe me a thing.”

Harrowhark drummed her long delicate fingers against the cover of the book, frowning furiously. At last she asked the most obvious question, with unconcealed suspicion, “Why would you help me?”

“Because all your moping is pathetic, Harrow,” said Ianthe frankly. “Gorgeous, but pathetic. I need you to get a grip. You aren’t going to find anything at Canaan House except bad memories, but since you’re hell-bent on going, I want you to get it over with before our time is up. Number 7 is coming for us. We cannot afford your attention to be elsewhere.”

Harrow sat there, black eyes boring into Ianthe’s as if she might read her thoughts and reveal her purpose. Ianthe held her gaze calmly for a while, and then prompted, with a conspiratorial twitch of her lips, “Well, Little Beast?”

“Don’t call me that,” snapped Harrow, and then, “What’s your angle, Tridentarius?”

“No catch,” assured Ianthe, and then, a little softer, and a little pleading, “Put this—put _her_ —to rest and come _back_ to us, Harrow.”

Harrowhark looked back at her with an expression gone cold as a grave, snapped the book shut, and said, “Alright.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ianthe and Harrow's dynamic is honestly one of my favorite things to write.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Exordium and Terminus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26879941) by [propergoffic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/propergoffic/pseuds/propergoffic)




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